The Tailwaggers store, which first opened its doors back in 2003 in Hollywood, has become a cornerstone of the Los Angeles doggy community, with a second store in West Hollywood. Spearheaded by its CEO Todd Warner, pictured here with his dogs Buddy and Henry, the stores do a top job of providing the community with healthy, natural pet care products that are consistent with a holistic approach to pet health.

The Tailwaggers name itself has a fine pedigree, dating back to the Tail-waggers club created in 1915 in England. Bette Davis put the organization on the map in the US when she was elected as President of Southern California’s branch in 1929. Her dedication to animal welfare was a powerful force in raising awareness in Hollywood. In 1938, Life magazine covered one of her fund raising events, which enlisted the likes of Howard Hughes as a generous donor and Walt Disney, who personally designed the place cards.

Todd Warner (note that the initials T and W align beautifully with the name of his store), is building on that legacy by carrying the baton with The Tailwaggers Foundation which serves as a financial resource for non-profit animal rescue groups who are struggling to cover the cost of medical care for sick and injured animals. Recognizing that healthy dogs and cats stand the best chance for finding a loving home, his donations directly facilitate the adoption process and improve animal welfare in general.

His heartfelt devotion to his four legged friends, necessary for the protection and care of animals without voices, culminates in the Waggy Awards on March 19. Bringing together the great and the good of the animal welfare community, Warner likes to think of these awards as 'our furry little Oscars'. Crusaders, activists and pioneers dedicated to the protection of animals will collect awards for their service alongside Oscar™-nominated actress and well-known animal activist Linda Blair as well as Tippi Hedren and Moby. The confluence of Hollywood, community spirit and animal welfare harks (or should that be barks?) back to those early days when Bette was fighting on behalf of humanity's most devoted companion.

Listening to George Michael’s lyrics were like therapy for me. I remember when 'Older' came out in 1996, it gave voice to my own closeted yearnings. ‘You Have Been Loved’ was a secret homage to his Brazilian lover Anselmo Feleppa who died from an HIV-related illness in 1993, although you could miss that if you weren't paying attention. I was hanging on every word. Closeted George was a master at placing an ambivalent pronoun that could fly under the radar. 'Fastlove' was loaded with subtle and not so subtle linguistic backflips: “Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me, And I see lovin’ in his eyes”. This ode to sexual adventure worked on another level too. Throughout it you hear a sample of a disco track with the haunting refrain “sending you forget me nots, to help you to remember, baby please forget me not I want you to remember." Only a gay man would understand why that resonates. The thrill of the chase, the dangers of promiscuity, the wild intoxication of anonymous sex is blended beautifully with that sad, melancholy ache that comes from being physically fulfilled while spiritually and emotionally there is still a void.

Of course George was yet to come out, and this track foreshadowed his toilet tango in Beverly Hills for which he was arrested in 1998. Careers have been sunk by a lot less than a lewd act, but George threw caution to the wind with 'Outside', the monster hit that became my own coming out anthem. In the video he deftly turned the judgement-laden narrative on its head. By transforming a men’s bathroom into a disco of policemen kissing, he challenged hypocrisy and created musical alchemy. What could have been his cue to crawl under a rock became a transcendent moment of glorious triumph. YAAS!

George was no angel, nor was he a stranger to cruising on Hampstead Heath, but he had the humility to poke fun at himself (see his cameo on Ricky Gervais’s Extras). That he had self destructive tendencies which got him into dicey situations is undeniable but you might do too if you had grown up in a culture that criminalises your basic instincts. As Alan Downs says in his book 'The Velvet Rage', “any person that grows up in an environment that is essentially invalidating struggles with shame.” And like too many gay men, George began to rely heavily on substances to numb the pain.

“Gay people are more than two and half times more likely to become alcohol or drug dependent, over two and half times more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression disorders,” Downs continues. Last year it was reported that George underwent three months of treatment near Zurich for depression. Not all gay men have depression or substance abuse problems. And you don't have to be gay to be an addict, but it helps. Throw global pop superstardom into the mix (Amy, Whitney, Michael Jackson et al) and you’re left with a volatile pressure cooker waiting to explode (or implode). Perhaps being caught with his pants down was exactly what George wanted to burn the house down. Trouble is when you light that match it’s not always easy to stop, especially when you have some faulty wiring that prohibits the ability to start or stop an activity in spite of destructive consequences.

My own coming out story ran concomitantly with and was facilitated by George’s. I still have all the press clippings. I wonder if there would be such a hoopla today? Back then, it was still considered acceptable to mock gay people in the media. Things have progressed but it’s interesting to observe how public toilets are still such a hot topic, albeit more for trans people. You don't hear too many stories of entrapment these days, which is essentially what happened. I had the honour of meeting him at Attitude’s 10 year anniversary party in 2004. He was with his ‘American angel’ Kenny at the time. Shortly after things started to go wrong. In 2006 he pleaded guilty for driving while unfit through drugs and in 2008 was cautioned for possession of class A drugs including crack cocaine. In 2010 he crashed his Range Rover into a shop in North London and again admitted to driving under the influence of drugs. Clearly George did not have his shit together, but to say that this was due to his fading career is incorrect . His “25 Live” tour (2006-8) grossed more than $200 million. Anyone who battles with mental illness or addiction knows that it’s an inside job; no amount of success is going to quell the demons, if anything it will exacerbate them.

George is part of a generation of gay men that lived through an awful storm. After a decade of death and shame he got to see gay marriage being legalised which is awesome, but it doesn't undo all those years plagued by worry, fear, heartache and pain. George crafted the soundtrack to our lives. Through his music he allowed us to find our common humanity: on 'Outside' he reminds us that “there’s nothing here but flesh and bone.” I stand on the shoulders of men like George who fought my battles for me. But I remain vigilant: shame, fear, and prejudice have not vanished. In an era when basic battles for legal recognition have been won, more insidious forms of homophobia are still very much alive. Maybe he flew a little too close to the sun, but in doing so he saved me from living a lie. Growing up gay is a lonely experience, or at least it was in the 90s. Thank you George for making me feel less alone. I hope you're happy up there in gay heaven. You brushed my eyes with angel's wings.

Nick’s Cove Restaurant, Oyster Bar & Cottages is located on the twisting, cliff-hugging route north from San Francisco up Pacific Coast Highway on a relatively undiscovered, unspoiled swath of pristine coastline. The construction of the highway in 1930, followed by the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, brought a surge in tourist traffic looking for food, lodging and adventure. Marin County became a popular destination for weekend motorists, and Nick's Cove is one of the last remaining historic settlements from those early days of tourism. Today, Nick’s Cove offers some of the finest seasonal, sustainable California cuisine sourced from the surrounding Marin and Sonoma County farms as well as fresh seafood and Tomales Bay oysters.

The Croft, the on-site farm and garden that was finished last summer, is now blossoming under the property’s own farmer, Brendan Thomas. Brendan is dedicated to making sure he not only grows a wide variety of vegetables sustainably, but that he does so while making a positive impact on the land. Thomas, inspired by bio-intensive, natural, and organic approaches to farming, is creating a system where all parts — animals, plants, and soil — work together to create a whole. Currently The Croft is supplying most of the restaurant’s mustard greens, chard, broccoli, cauliflower, honey and eggs. The chickens seem to be responding well to their coop with a view of the glittering Tomales Bay coastline.

High society types and other people of monetary means have flocked to the coastal community of Montecito near Santa Barbara, California, since the late 1800s when they came in search of winter sun, salty sea air, mesmerizing vistas of the Pacific Ocean, and a near perfect Mediterranean climate. Long time residents of Montecito include actress and scion to a multi-billion dollar fortune Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Oprah Winfrey who owns a 40+ acre spread that La Winfrey now calls The Promised Land.

But long before them there was Madame Ganna Walska, a Polish opera singer and socialite, who purchased an estate here in 1941 and spent 43 years designing a world-class botanical garden called Lotusland. For her, grand Italianate gardens were boring. Her taste leaned more towards the experimental incorporating the principle of sustainability long before that was even a word. The extraordinary collection of cycads, cacti and palms, ferns, aloes and lotuses are a testament to the singular vision of Madame Walska, a bold and audacious pioneer if ever there was one.

Born in 1887 in Poland, her charm, allure, and powers of seduction were legendary. She lived a cultured life in St Petersburg, Russia, being named the most beautiful woman at the ball by Tsar Nicholas. She collected famous friends and married six times, a number of those husbands being very wealthy, and actually became an opera singer to get the attention of a husband to be. She moved to New York during World War I where she continued to sing and get married a lot, first to multimillionaire sportsman and carpet tycoon Alexander Smith Cochran and then to industrialist Harold F. McCormick, chairman of the International Harvester Company. Orson Welles claimed that McCormick's lavish promotion of Walska's opera career was a direct influence on the screenplay for Citizen Kane.

After a short marriage to death ray inventor Harry Grindell Matthews (it seems having three names was de rigueur in those days) it was on the encouragement of her sixth husband, yoga master and guru-trickster Theos Casimir Bernard, that she purchased the historic 37-acre "Cuesta Linda" estate in Montecito. Together, Walska and Bernard planned to create a spiritual retreat called Tibetland. However the guru was revealed to be a charlatan, and the marriage fell apart.

Madame's passions, formerly reserved for men, travel and luxury were soon subsumed by her love of the garden. Eccentric to her core, Madame used to wander barefoot on the grass with a bird called ‘Happy’ perched on her shoulder. She built an outdoor theater where she placed her collection of antique stone grotesques. Here a stage backdrop and wings made from tall hedges became a kind of living metaphor: nature had her back. Like many a rare bird of paradise, Madame was plagued by stage fright; had she not been, perhaps we wouldn’t have been blessed with such a glorious legacy of horticultural splendor.

*It turns out our informed docent Cristi Walden is herself a pioneer in the plant world running the nearby Sea Crest Nursery so make sure you get on her tour when Lotusland reopens in February 2017.

It may look a bit rough round the edges now, but in one year the 700 block of South Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles will be transformed into a high-end restaurant and boutique shopping mecca.

First known as the LA Terminal Market, the 30-acre plot that Row DTLA now occupies was once the site of the former Southern Pacific Railroad HQ, a major hub for the distribution of produce across the region from 1917 to 1923.

In June it debuted the Brooklyn export Smorgasburg food and flea market, held Sundays on what still operates as a produce market during the rest of the week.

Eventually, Row DTLA will be a place where people can park their car in a mammoth 4,000-space parking lot - the biggest in Los Angeles County, no less - and shop at retailers that are less familiar to the West Coast crowd.

Right now, the downtown behemoth is kicking off the holiday season by hosting a bricks and mortar shopping pop-up for twelve outfits that are already killing it online. They include snazzy Swedish watch brand Daniel Wellington, purveyors of minimalistic time pieces with interchangeable straps, New York luggage line Away Travel and This Is Ground, producers of premium leather kits that are proudly “designed in LA, made in Italy”, with a focus on utility and usability.

With the soon-to-open hipster hotel Nomad at Seventh and Olive streets, downtown Los Angeles’ cultural renaissance continues apace, providing an irresistible laboratory for brands that cater to the culturally attuned.

My love affair with California started in the 90s when I discovered Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Maupin’s tale about a group of friends who live at the top of some wooden steps at 28 Barbary Lane in 70’s San Francisco opened up a portal to a magical land of possibilities, a gay utopia. Much of the action in his book Significant Others is set on the banks of northern California’s Russian River. In my heart I always knew that I would one day visit this fabled paradise. And twenty years later I did just that.

Did you watch the Season 2 premiere of “Looking” where the guys end up at a bacchanalian party in the woods after running into a Faerie? It was set in Russian River, a longtime LGBT getaway since the 1970s. As a card-carrying fantasy addict, I should have known better. “Looking” was riding on a wave of romantic nostalgia that doesn't really exist today.

I stayed at Dawn Ranch, formerly Fife’s, which was Guerneville’s most popular gay resort from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Back then there was a bunkhouse in the lower meadow which turned into a club. By all accounts it got pretty frisky down there on the banks of the river. Today, Dawn Ranch is mostly a wedding facility with marriage packages. I didn't feel like a solo traveling homo was the kind of guest they wanted floating about. They didn’t actively make me feel unwelcome but they didn’t actively make me feel welcome either. What is it they say about the sins of omission? Being ignored or airbrushed from history is kind of rude, but I digress.

Guerneville is much less gay than it used to be which is indicative of a wider trend but Russian River has its own specific and charged story. Because San Francisco was hit hard by AIDS, resorts like Guerneville suffered. Then the dotcom crash happened and more recently the 2008 economic downturn. In conjunction with the inevitable floods you get from being perched on the banks of a river, former gay resorts took a major battering.

Certainly any gay business owner in Guerneville with an ounce of acumen, and many are still gay run, target the waves of tech entrepreneurs that emanate from San Francisco. Most resorts now cater to the spa break or wine country enthusiast. San Francisco's demographics are changing rapidly (it's as expensive as Manhattan to live there now) so the getaways in its vicinity are changing accordingly.

Dawn Ranch is a case in point: locals say that when Fife's owner turned his back on the gay customer it ripped the gay soul out of Guerneville. But the truth is that how gay men fraternize has changed. There is no 'gay beach' on The River, as featured in “Looking”. Believe me, I looked, and in fact I went to that very patch of beach where the canoe scene took place. I was the only gayer. That will change at big gay gatherings like Lazy Bear Weekend: this Aug 3-8 marks its 20th anniversary (lazybearweekend.com) which sounds like a lot of fun.

Service is notoriously patchy on The River so this might force people off Grindr and Scruff momentarily, or at least until they find wifi, but apps in general have had a major impact on the mating rituals and travelling patterns of homosexualists. Somehow the idea of us all congregating in one spot and dancing together till dawn seems like quite a retro concept these days. The R3 (Russian River Resort) Bar and Hotel’s pool seems to qualify as the main gay hub but there were no “Promised Land” style discos in the redwoods on the July weekend I visited. That was for TV optics.

Another factor is Airbnb: smaller groups of gay men come up from San Francisco (glued to their phones) to party together in the confines of their rental cabin (and then post on Snapchat to legitimize the experience). The only exclusively gay resorts are R3 and Highlands, which is clothing optional. The chequered history of some of The River’s gay resorts is worth a documentary in itself. At the height of its gay renaissance in the mid 70s, The Woods resort would host 10,000 patrons on a holiday weekend. Then there was a mysterious kitchen fire and it burned to the ground.

Boon Hotel + Spa, which used to be a cruisy gay hotel called Paradise Cove, is one of the best lodging options. Crista Luedtke was among the first gay business owners to plant her flag in Guerneville. The result is a chic, minimalist hotel that marries old and new elements, including reclaimed-redwood furniture, cork floors, and the option of summer glamping in tents. Dogs are welcome.

Dawn Ranch has totally removed same sex couples from its website/marketing material and does not participate in Lazy Bear. They've followed the money: (straight) weddings and wine tourists. It makes me smile to think that bridezillas staying here will be sleeping above what was once a dark room. If walls (or trees) could talk. It's just so weird (and a little sad) to think that hundreds of gay men used to congregate around this pool and trot off to the bunkhouse for sex and now it’s for sanitized hen parties. This used to be the flagship gay resort but apparently it was flooded badly in ’95 and the owners didn’t have insurance, or something. The orgiastic legacy of Guerneville is long-gone and the air has rather gone out of the “Gay Riviera” moniker. But for a slice of LGBTQ history, Russian River is the real deal. And the giant redwoods, as indifferent today to what goes on underneath their branches as they were thousands of years ago, are a reminder of how tiny humans are compared to the majesty of nature.

Where to eat:

Boon owner Luedtke’s ventures also extend to the dining realm with Boon Eat + Drink, where seasonal menus take full advantage of the region’s abundance of great produce. A few doors down Main Street, her café and gourmet grocery Big Bottom Market is a hit for its biscuits and brunch/lunch fare. And we love anything with the name bottom in it, although, it turns out Guerneville was first settled in 1860 on an alluvial flat known as Big Bottom.

Once upon a time, trams rumbled through the hills and canyons of northeast Silverlake. In the era before mass auto ownership, developers had to arrange electric streetcar or commuter railway transportation if they were going to sell real estate. Because the Pacific Electric passenger services were designed and built by people who were gaining profits from real estate development, they were not financed simply to make money providing a passenger service. After World War 1 real estate developers in Southern California and elsewhere had stopped funneling capital into public transit and began shifting the costs of providing transportation to the residents themselves. With no funding from real estate development profits, there was systematic disinvestment in public transit and the trolleys fell into decline.

In the 1940s, the Pacific Electric Railway system was sold to National City Lines, a company whose investors included Firestone Tires, Standard Oil, and General Motors. This shady move eventually resulted in the dismantling of L.A.’s urban rail network. But Sunset Junction, its name a relic of L.A.'s heritage as a streetcar city, continued to serve as an important node in L.A.'s streetcar network until May 31, 1953, when the Pacific Electric shuttered its South Hollywood-Sherman Line. Streetcars continued to roam the Hollywood Line up Sunset until September 26, 1954, when buses replaced trolleys. Today, the tracks and electrical wires are gone, but you can still envision the trolleys making their way down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard.

The trolleys and streetcars may be long gone, but the staircases that lace the steep-streeted hillsides of Silverlake remain. City planners and developers installed these “walk streets” in the 1920s as direct routes for pedestrians to get down to the trolley lines. The staircase-to-trolley system was so much a part of the landscape that developers in some areas built houses that had no other access to the outside world. These once forgotten paths, neglected and unused for decades, serve as historical reminders of a bygone time when this was not a city of cars.

Mapplethorpe gets top billing at LACMA and the Getty’s twin retrospective, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium’, exploring the work of one of the most influential visual artists of the late 20th century.

Twenty-five years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition ‘The Perfect Moment’, which included his famous X portfolio, received a very different reception. Gay S&M isn't for everyone, I grant you, but when the exhibit hit Cincinnati in 1990, all hell broke loose. Local law-enforcement officials and anti-pornography groups took it upon themselves to rise up against the exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center.

The Mapplethorpe obscenity trial—the first time a museum was taken to court on criminal charges related to works on display—became one of the most heated battlefronts in the era’s culture wars. Taking place over two weeks in the fall of 1990, the resulting attention challenged perceptions of art, public funding, and what constituted “obscenity.” To give you some cultural context, this is the same year that Linda, Christy and Naomi stepped in for a (then) closeted George Michael in his iconic 'Freedom' vid (a full 8 years before George was arrested for a ‘lewd act’ in a Beverly Hills toilet incidentally).

At the time the body was a contentious subject. From the craze for physical fitness to heated debates about reproductive health, pornography and the AIDS epidemic, the 80s had been marked by a heightened pre-occupation with bodies and sex. The artist himself had died of AIDS related illness in 1989.

A quarter century on, an organized minority is still trying to enforce their worldview on America. Conservative Republican governors have introduced ‘religious freedom’ laws to ‘protect’ a ‘vulnerable religious minority’ in Mississippi and N. Carolina. This is a deft use of Orwellian Newspeak. In the upside down South, the bully is now the minority, and freedom is now being touted as a smokescreen for discrimination.

In the summer of 1989, Mapplethorpe’s traveling solo exhibit sparked a national debate about whether tax dollars should be used to support potentially "obscene" material. It's interesting to see how sexual politics and money intersect in 2016: tech companies are condemning Mississippi and N. Carolina’s anti gay laws, which are in part a revolt against the legalization of same sex marriage last summer. That the gay movement is now so cozy with corporations is progress, I guess, especially given that it is still possible to be fired for being gay or transgender in 28 states. That’s right, you can lose your job, your ability to support yourself, for being homosexual. The war is still being waged, and we stand on the shoulders of giants like Mapplethorpe who fought our battles long before it made financial sense for corporate giants to stick up for us.

“Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium” at the Getty Center and LACMA until July 31; lacma.org, getty.edu. Listen to my report on Monocle24 here

With Nick Jones's Soho Warehouse opening next year, Downtown’s march toward gentrification is taking off like gangbusters. With authentic loft style living and former industrial warehouses aplenty, the neighbourhood still feels like a pre-sanitised New York from the 70s - for now. On June 25, the US Bank Tower, currently ‘the tallest skyscraper in the West’, is opening a restaurant and observation deck on the 71st floor with its very own glass slide. Riders will coast 45 feet from the 70th floor to the 69th floor, encased in glass an inch and a quarter thick that will jut out from the skyscraper 1000 feet above downtown LA.

Booming construction of glossy projects like the Broad museum continues apace while art galleries are popping up all over the place, Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel's Arts District opening being the most notable. With exhibition spaces in London, New York and Zurich, it's a statement to the rest of the world that, as a global art metropolis, Los Angeles has arrived.

Downtown LA has pretty much always had gay bars, but these days the gays in the know have jettisoned WeHo for bars and clubs like Precinct, Redline and Mattachine. A fake giant redwood tree is on display at the lovingly restored Clifton's cafeteria, originally from the 1930s, while Ace hotel, above, has one of the best rooftops in town, up high amongst the twinkling time capsule that is DTLA.

The fabled Hollywood retreat and cradle of midcentury modernism is riding a wave of energy and enthusiasm not seen since the city’s postwar heyday. Some of the world’s most visionary architects moved here to build houses for Hollywood stars in the desert modernism style, developed from the 1920s through the early 1970s. That Palm Springs is having a style moment was cemented by Louis Vuitton celebrating its 2016 Resort Collection with a fashion show at The Bob Hope Estate, a Palm Springs landmark designed by the great modernist architect John Lautner. Here are some of the highlights from the 11-day festival celebrating all things midcentury modern.

hollywood | tab hunter

Palm Springs, two hours by car from LA, has been a hideaway for the Hollywood set since the 50‘s. The studios required their big name stars to be on call and no further than 100 miles from Hollywood. This is why Palm Springs became such a popular spot for the Hollywood elite at that time.

“America’s boy next door” Tab Hunter, pictured, was a frequent visitor. This week, he gave a rare insight into what his life was like as a closeted box office star back in the 50's while doing a Q&A at the screening of his new movie “Tab Hunter Confidential”. This is noteworthy because the festival celebrates all things midcentury including the cars and the stars.

poolside gossip | slim sarons | neutra

No doubt you’ve seen the photo shot in 1970 by Slim Aarons. Two attractive women sit in lounge chairs beside a teal-blue pool looking fabulous and moneyed. A third, all legs and carefree attitude, strides toward them with a drink in her hand. In the background is a modern glass-and-stone house and purplish mountains. That house, the iconic Kaufmann Residence is THE house that kickstarted the whole movement to restore and revive mid-century architecture in Palm Springs; the very house that may have single-handedly transformed Palm Springs from a recreational haven into an architectural-cultural destination. Built in 1946 by architect Richard Neutra, who died in 1970, this unforgettable residence is widely considered to be one of the finest works of residential architecture in North America.

raymond loewy

In March 1962, Mr. Loewy, who had a house in Palm Springs, saw the Kennedy presidential plane landing at the airport. He thought the graphics looked terrible and offered to make some suggestions. His color scheme and graphics proved to be timeless, and they survive today on Obama’s Boeing 747 who happened to be in Palm Springs this week while having a pow-wow with leading dignitaries at Sunnylands. Just as Mr. Loewy’s logos and designs helped to differentiate commercial products in the marketplace (Lucky Strike, the Coca Cola bottle), his work on Air Force One helped make the plane a world-famous symbol of presidential majesty and power.

albert frey

Albert Frey was the father of the Desert Modernism style and one of the small handful of architects responsible for Palm Springs's midcentury look (he designed the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway station, the Tramway Gas Station, Palm Springs City Hall). This week I visited Frey II House, the second of two houses he built for himself in the city. Frey picked out an incredible spot on the side of a mountain (just above the Palm Springs Art Museum). Frey’s Aluminaire House — a 1930s architectural installation — is coming to Palm Springs for permanent residency soon. The feeling is that Palm Springs is the spiritual home for the all-metal house which is currently disassembled in storage.

bauhaus

Don’t miss the Bauhaus exhibition at The Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion (101 Museum Drive). Located in a 1961 savings-and-loan building crafted by pioneering desert architect E. Stewart Williams and renovated by the Los Angeles firm Marmol Radziner, this is one of four imposing bank buildings which were designed to inspire confidence and optimism at a time when pent-up consumer demand was fueling exceptionally strong economic growth in a post war period.

Let's get right to it: here are my takeaways from the fourth annual Los Angeles Art Book Fair organized by New York nonproft Printed Matter.

backgroundLos Angeles Art Book Fair is the West Coast companion to NY's Art Book Fair with books, special edition prints and limited-edition zines galore to ogle. More than 250 exhibitors come from all over the globe — from Spain and Denmark to Israel and Japan — as well as numerous publishing outfits from the United States, including more than 100 from California alone.

spain focusFollowing the successful participation of Spain’s Libros Mutantes in the New York fair, Spain is the first country to have a dedicated Focus Room which will give a boost to the work of independent Spanish publishers – a sector that has undergone a major creative transformation in recent years. The art book, fanzine and photo book are currently experiencing a ‘moment’ in Spain. Taking part in this event helps put Spanish self-publishing on the global map.

'blowjob alley'The GBLTQ community is represented in all its glory at the LAABF, the zine being a particularly powerful tool for any disenfranchised group that feels it's being misrepresented by mainstream media. Make sure you visit the Original Plumbing stand, an independently produced zine by and for trans men. Other delights include visual artist Adam Seymour who operates under the name Rural Ranga (he's an aussie ginger and they call gingers orang-utans apparently). His debut art book Wank Bank features memoirs of his life as a happy-ending masseur in New York. "Wank Bank was 100% funded by the flicks of my wrist" says Seymour.

art+musicBrooklyn-based rare book dealer Arthur Fournier Fine unearths an archive of the Southern California punk zine FER YOUz that hasn’t been shown before. Fournier is displaying the original color masters of the zine, which was produced by photographers Brian and Nikki Tucker in the early 1980s. Meanwhile Los Angeles conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg has created a record store that features records about records. First, he digitizes obscure works from his own record collection, then he records these onto blank vintage discs that he both displays and sells online as part of a project called the El Segundo Record Club.

women+zinesGuerilla girls reinventing the ‘f’ word (feminism) is a big theme at this year’s LAABF. Traditionally the zine universe has been considered a masculine domain, but not so any more. Tamara Santibañez produces Discipline which pokes a finger in the eye of heteronormative, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy by shining a light on the human body, the subtext and the overlooked. She is joined by a gang of other women artists whose work proves that zines are not just for the boys.

so-cal focusEast of Borneo is an online magazine and book publisher that documents contemporary art and its history, as considered from Los Angeles. Standout title includes Piecing Together Los Angeles which is the first dedicated collection dedicated to the mother of California architecture writing, Esther McCoy, an historian and witness to the birth of West Coast mid-century design. Another title, Facing the Music, documents Walt Disney Concert Hall and the redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles.

mason williamsGrammy award-winning composer, artist, writer, musician and screenwriter Mason Williams made pioneering contributions to California conceptualism in the 1960’s. Presented by Alden Projects, Bus (originally exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1967), a 36-ft long silkscreened image of a Greyhound bus, pictured above, is unfurled here. Lifelong friend and sometimes collaborator Ed Ruscha’s work is also on display (e.g. photo novel Crackers). MW’s contributions to LA conceptualism in the 1960’s continue to defy classification.

extra stuffThis year, the fair has also inspired a number of off-site events including nighttime art book parties at the Ace Hotel, an artist reading at the Million Dollar Theater and Sarah Peters' floating library installation in Echo Park, where visitors in pedal boats will be able to check out works to read as they float around the lake. A staff of friendly floating librarians facilitate the check out process and make reading suggestions.

The LA Art Book Fair (Feb 12-14), held at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in DTLA. Listen to my report on Monocle 24 here

America is having a powerful cultural moment. Beyoncé delivered a highly political Super Bowl half time show after surprise-releasing the video for her totally brilliant new single Formation, a black queer feminist f**k off to white supremacist heteropatriarchy. I love the fact that Queen Bey has expanded the conversation further by including New Orleans-based trans singer and rapper Big Freedia aka ‘The Queen of Bounce’. Incidentally, despite the themes in the video, nothing was shot in New Orleans. It was all shot in Los Angeles. The Southern Gothic set was actually an historic Pasadena home. But frankly who cares? This is the biggest music video in recent memory and a call to action from the most powerful woman in show business. It is time that we all got in formation: “[She] did not come to play with you hoes. [She] came to slay, bitch.”

My sister forwarded a bundle of mail which included The Oratorian, a magazine for alumni of The Oratory School. It gave me a bit of a jolt, especially as it arrived in the week of my 40th birthday when I'm feeling unusually nostalgic. I never think about my days there. That period between 13 and 18 years old was a kind of purgatory. It wasn't until I left school in 1994 that my life began. But the founder, John Henry Newman, interests me. The Oratory Fathers wanted ‘Eton minus the wickedness’ and so The Oratory was founded by John Henry Newman in 1859. Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was a theologian who converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism in October 1845. In early life, he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. There was an article in the magazine on Ambrose St. John, John Henry’s ‘husband’ for 32 years, although of course it didn't refer to him like that. Newman insisted three different times that he be buried in the same grave with St. John: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St. John’s grave -- and I give this as my last, my imperative will,” he wrote, later adding: “This I confirm and insist on.” Newman died of pneumonia on Aug. 11, 1890 at age 89. The shroud over his coffin bore his personal coat of arms with the Latin motto, “Cor ad cor loquitur” (Heart speaks to heart), which he adopted when he became cardinal. Their joint memorial stone is inscribed with a Latin motto chosen by Newman: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.”(Out of the shadows and reflections into the truth.”) They shared a small grave in the English town of Rednal until the Vatican removed his remains in an attempt to cover up the relationship. With beatification, Newman is now only one step away from official sainthood. Canonization would make Cardinal Newman the first English person who has lived since the 17th century to be officially recognised as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. He was beatified on 19 September 2010 at an open air mass in Birmingham. He is already a saint to me and I hope he and Ambrose are having a ball up in gay heaven.

Today I am doing something that I never thought I'd do: I'm selling up and leaving London. I am deeply grateful that I got to own a flat in a city where people are scrambling to get on the property ladder. It was a godsend to have my own bolthole. But I am in a different place now and I want this next chapter in my life to be here in LA. Hedging my bets, keeping a door open on my old life would leave me in limbo. Half measures availed us nothing: for this to work I had to fully immerse myself and commit. It took a lot to get out here and I have faith that if I'm brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward me with a new hello. Sounds cheesy, but that is my experience. A clean slate. A blank canvas. A fresh start.

Laurel Canyon is a mountainous Los Angeles neighborhood with a snaking boulevard that connects West Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley. Just five minutes from the clubs down the hill on Sunset Strip, where countless musicians of yore have honed their craft, it has served as an escape into a bucolic idyll for decades. Back in the 30s, Errol Flynn had a huge pile up here before Sonny and Cher, Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison made Laurel Canyon their home in the 60s and 70s. This is where Joni Mitchell was living when she wrote “Ladies of the Canyons” and “Clouds”.

Back then you lived in Laurel Canyon if you were too poor to live in Benedict, Coldwater or Nichols Canyon. There was a time, 1965 to 1969, when you could hitchhike up and down it. And then the Manson Family thing happened a few canyons over and the hallucinatory joyride was dead: beauty had turned to brutality. People started rolling up their windows, locking doors, putting fences around their property—and taking coke. All things must pass.

Architecturally speaking, it is about as schizophrenic and precarious as you could wish for. Laurel Canyon was the Bel Air of its day, and many of the English Tudor and Spanish style homes can still be seen in the canyon today, while several modernist Case Study houses were built here between the mid 40s and mid 60s. The cabin-style homes teetering on stilts, cantilevered atop perilous hilltop bluffs, may or may not be still standing after El Nino hits. In fact, residents of this woodsy utopia are being told to stock up and hunker down, with previous El Nino storms causing cars to be washed away by the apocalyptic deluge. If this year’s “Godzilla” turns out to be the monster it has been predicted to be, some of the rickety old canyon abodes may just float away. And if the floods don’t get you, the earthquake will, or there are always the coyotes to contend with. Let your pooch get loose at night and it’s sayonara to Pickles. But that’s the price you pay for living in Neverland, right?

When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.” —Joni Mitchell

As a transplant I see it as my mission to understand my adopted country. A year ago I upped sticks and moved to LA with a dream of becoming a freelance writer. Other than hearing stories about how LA is having a moment I didn’t really know what to expect; it was more of a hunch, an innate calling to explore the sprawling, schizophrenic city that has served as a backdrop to countless movies and tv shows.

Turns out that I chose exactly the right spot to road test a new way of living and working while I straddle the poverty line because most folks I know there are cash poor time rich, a budding something or other. It’s an expansive place of possibilities, the seat of all myth-making in the West, a destination for dreamers where 'portfolio careers' are de rigueur.

In New York (and London) every inch of space is prime real estate; in LA there is room to breath. Consequently it’s relatively affordable to live there. A friend has recently moved from London to New York. She and her husband have settled on a snazzy one-bed apartment just across the Brooklyn Bridge. She is paying, wait for it, $4,500/month, and even though she has a well-paid job at a reputable ad agency she has to stump up 4 month’s rent in advance plus a deposit given she doesn’t have the required credit rating in the US yet. With the broker's fee on top she's looking at paying $30,000 before she’s even been to Ikea, which is a chunk of change. Not everyone will go the broker route of course.

That New York is hemorrhaging creative types to other cities is not news but now I understand why. Much like London, NYC is fast becoming a resort for the jetset (it was un-affectionately called "Dubai with blizzards" recently). That’s not to say all the rough edges have been smoothed away. The Lower East Side has mercifully held onto its grittiness but a one-bed in a Delancey St tenement will cost you $2100/month. There are dishevelled fixer-uppers in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn are still pretty ghetto but it’s hard to start from scratch in New York anymore, you have to come from money, be married to it, or earn a hefty pay package in a corporate job. That thrilling, dangerous pre-AIDS era of crumbling ruins, black outs and abandoned piers in 70s New York is long gone, but so is the 90s fallacy of living in a Friends-style apartment in Greenwich Village. If your job’s a joke, you’re broke, and your love life’s DOA, better move to LA.

That's not to say Los Angeles isn't also becoming a playland for the global money set. With a GDP of $825 billion and 330,000 high net worthers worth a total of $1.2 trillion residing there, Los Angeles is a growing force in its own right. “Los Angeles in an incredible city and is the center of a creative explosion right now” said Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer. “There is an amazing and inspiring mix of people from the worlds of film, technology, music, architecture, food and culture and now fashion, all doing interesting things there”.

New York's supremacy is untouchable. Like London it is a global center of power and wealth, a world city. And I suppose that's the point, it feels like a more extreme version of London. The cultural distance I feel as a Brit in a foreign country is amplified by being in sun-baked southern California. Moby, a native New Yorker who moved to LA, puts it beautifully: "In New York, you can be easily overwhelmed by how much success everyone else seems to be having, whereas experimentation and a grudging familiarity with occasional failure are part of LA's ethos". He continues: "If you're in New York or London, you're surrounded by a world that has been subdued and overseen by humans for centuries". It's precisely because of its pre-apocalyptic strangeness, its simultaneous ugliness and beauty, that I'm so smitten by LA, always seemingly an inch away from oblivion (be it quake, fire, drought, coyote or rattlesnake attack).

Commenting on this tiny island, Bill Bryson once said “if I parachuted you randomly into a place you would be within 5 miles of something globally important and significant, so much has happened in such a small area”. Suffolk is no exception. Locating myself in Woodbridge for a month, a beautiful market town 8 miles from the coast, I discover I am in easy reach of Sutton Hoo, an Anglo Saxon burial ground, Orford Ness, England’s very own Area 51, and Aldeburgh where back in 1948 Benjamin Britten started a little festival which has become arguably the best musical event in Britain. Aldeburgh Food & Drink Festival (with fringe events continuing until October 11) is a good opportunity to sample the main edible players on the Suffolk coast, but it’s worth exploring the jewel in the foodie crown, Orford, at any time of year. With its 12th century castle and a coastal nature reserve just across the river, it is insanely picturesque. For simple, un-mucked-about food in unpretentious surroundings, nowhere does it better than Butley Orford Oysterage: they have oysters and salmon from their own smoke house. A boat trip will take you across to the spooky Orford Ness where intrigue hangs in the air. Top-secret military experiments were conducted here including the birth of radar (snooping on the Russians) and developing Britain’s atomic bomb. Go further inland and architecture geeks will go weak at the knees over Lavenham, a village that grew rich from the wool trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, then lost it all and went into decline. Because the local inhabitants were broke they didn’t have the funds to upgrade to the latest styles of architecture. What’s left is a Tudor time capsule, making it the most complete medieval town in Britain with a glorious ‘wool church’. Far grander and more ornate than a weaving village this size warranted, then, as now, the rich wanted to show off their wealth and this was how they did it back in 1525. Suffolk has long been a meeting place for artists, perhaps drawn by its moody skies and watery landscape. Turns out George Orwell, famous for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, spent part of his fledgling career in Southwold, a charming seaside town with neat little beach huts and a tat-free pier. OK let’s be honest, it’s the North Sea, Santa Barbara this is not. Like Nigel Slater said, the British aren't good at 'seaside'. But whichever way you turn, major milestones in history have taken place here that emanate far beyond these pebbly shores.

First staged in 2003, the London Design Festival (September 19-27) is one of the world's most important annual design events. A major feature of the London Design Festival each year is the ambitious programme of special projects and installations.

Assemble has designed “a forest of timber columns” for a V&A exhibition which marks what would have been British furniture designer Robin Day’s 100th year. Titled Robin Day Works in Wood, the installation, a nod to Day’s childhood growing up near the woodlands of High Wycombe, will be displayed outside the V&A’s Britain 1500-1900 Galleries.

One of Day’s last designs was a chair made for Ercol, which was part of a project called Onetree where designers were asked to create objects using timber from a single oak tree. At the time Day said: “As a designer, I greatly enjoy working in timber. Unlike synthetic materials, it has unpredictability, an infinite variety of texture and pattern, smells good when worked and is sympathetic to the touch – it has soul.”

Born in 1915, Robin Day was one of the designers who created a modern British style in the early 1950s. Like other designers of the time, he firmly believed that mass-produced furniture could be well designed and sold at affordable prices. Here, Day at work in 1953 on the Q Stak chair.

Kylie Minogue and Shaggy have released a duet called Black and White. The track is from a surprise EP with American dj and producer Fernando Garibay which features other collaborations with Godfather of Disco, Giorgio Moroder, and the genius Sam Sparo. Black and White is shot like a lo-fi home movie which signals a new direction for Kylie, who looks as joyful and fresh as she did in the video for her epoch-defining 1990 masterpiece Better the Devil You Know. We salute you Ms. Minogue. Roc Nation who?

She made her triumphant return to the stage when she kicked off her Unbreakable World Tour earlier this week in Vancouver. And now we get to see the artwork for her long-awaited new album, Unbreakable. A titular homage to her brother's final studio album Invincible perhaps?